Apple has been awarded a patent for the huge glass door and hallway that welcomes fanbois into its Shanghai shop.
The fruity tech giant is known for the extravagant exteriors of its iThing emporiums. But this particular portal looks more like the engine room of a spaceship than a phone store entrance: it's made of curved glass …

Re: At the sound of the siren...

bling blong!

Re: bling blong!

"How much has this door cost in total?"

Don't consider the cost. It's a symbol.

Unfortunately it's a symbol that the company has lost its way, and cannot see that there is no market or shareholder value from patenting a revolving door a hundred years after such things were invented. In some ways removing the image of Saint Steve is quite fitting, because he was somebody who was hugely product and brand centric.

Re: "bling blong! Expensive"

You completely miss the point, this is an incredibly cheap thing.

Look at the picture, and even better the wider-angle one on http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/02/apple_wins_patent_for_entrance_to_retail_store/ --- the whole store is basically a hole in the ground, invisible. But with this tower, including the Apple logo floating some 10meters above the ground, the entire square is Apple-dominated, and visible from afar; say you are standing above the HSBC branch, then you look straight/up to the Apple logo while the shops at the HSBC level invisible or indistinct...

This turns the situation upside down, where the least-visible underground shop is visually dominant. Like most Apple successes, a well-engineered leveraging of essentially simple visual sleight-of-hand which requires an uncanny understanding of how humans work as social individuals. Whether you like it or feel manipulated --- it's great manipulation.

But this newfangled 'door' thing sounds great.

You won't believe the drafts we have here along the 'tall rectangular entrance holes to the house'. This 'door' would surely improve our lives; I'll see if I can produce a knockoff with some wood.

Now to think of something for the 'light entrance points' we have at most rooms, the drafts are just as bad: They're not as tall as the 'entrance holes' but wider. That 'glass' thing might also be an inspiration there.

Where's the disabled access?

Re: Where's the disabled access?

They don't need a lift to get into the building.

And why would anyone want to leave the loving, warm, appley embrace of a Jesus-Store anyway? Either that or they'll be instantly cured, as soon as they've made their sacrifice to the deity of the shrine...

So when are they suing the Louvre...?

Whose entrance also comprises a suitably blingfested glass structure (albeit a pyramid) leading downstairs to a world famous landmark....? Surely this outrageous French luddites, with their so called 'works of art' should be treated with the contempt they deserve and forced to conform to the New World Order??

Bootstrap note FYI

Only one thing to call it...

re: Dying billionaire biz tyrant AIRBRUSHED from history by APPLE ..

"An early design patent [PDF] for the cylindrical doorway, filed in July 2010, has few details about the structure beyond some sketches. Steve Jobs is listed among its inventors. It was submitted shortly before the Shanghai store opened to the public in mid-2010, and was approved by US officials in March 2012. But the billionaire was missing from the list of applicants in the patent granted yesterday" ..

Perhaps the reason his name is missing is he wasn't involved in drawing up the patent as he was too busy dying of pancreatic cancer. In you desperation to find anything derogatory to say about Apple, you're really grasping here. Where's the picture of Jobs grave that should accompany these stories?

When the CEO's name is on the patent its ripe for being challenged and thrown out.

Jobs was a great marketer not an inventor and his Jobs as sole inventor patents show that. There is nothing wrong with design patents. they just don't represent technological insight and scientific advancement.